Word: vision
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Historians' comments: "A skilled and decent administrator"; "Lacked the 'vision thing...
F.D.R.'s education in foreign affairs had been at the hands of two Presidents he greatly admired. Theodore Roosevelt, his kinsman (a fifth cousin), taught him national-interest, balance-of-power geopolitics. Woodrow Wilson, whom he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, gave him the vision of a world beyond balances of power, an international order founded on the collective maintenance of the peace. F.D.R.'s internationalism used T.R.'s realism as the heart of Wilson's idealism...
...movement that mobilized every class of society against the imperialist, yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a program of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Nehru, was the archproponent of modernization, and it was Nehru's vision, not Gandhi's, that was eventually--and perhaps inevitably--preferred...
...time or, worse, the inclination to assimilate many-sided truths. The harshest truth of all is that Gandhi is increasingly irrelevant in the country whose "little father"--Bapu--he was. As the analyst Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, India came into being as a secularized state, but Gandhi's vision was essentially religious. However, he "recoiled" from Hindu nationalism. His solution was to forge an Indian identity out of the shared body of ancient narratives. "He turned to the legends and stories from India's popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of history...
...fathers of Israel? Were they no more than a bunch of lunatics, attempting to perform on a 20th century stage a bizarre blend of biblical yearnings, 19th century nationalism, socialism and Jewish Messianism? Did Ben-Gurion, at the end of the day, devote his life to a fleeting, surreal vision of resurrecting the Jewish people as a modern, democratic nation in their ancient land...